THE SLOTH 493 



liad discovered a flaw among the general beauty of the Creator's 

 works ; but let him view the animal in the situation for which 

 it was ordained, and he will soon retract his hasty judgment, 

 and discover it to be no less perfect in its kind, and no less 

 admirably fitted for its sphere of existence, than the most highly 

 organised of the mammalian tribes. 



For the sloth, in his wild state, spends his whole life in the 

 trees, and never once touches the earth but through force or by 

 accident. Like the monkey, he has been formed for an exclu- 

 sively sylvan life, high above the ground, in the green canopy of 

 the woods ; but while the nimble simiaj constantly live upon the 

 branches, the sloth is doomed to spend his whole life under them. 

 He moves, he rests, he sleeps suspended from the boughs of trees, 

 a wonderfully strange way of life, for which no other four-footed 

 animal of the Old or the New World has been destined. 



And now examine his organisation with reference to this 

 peculiar mode of existence, and all his seeming deficiencies and 

 deformities will appear most admirably adapted to his wants, 

 for these strong, muscular, preposterously long fore-feet, while 

 the hinder extremities are comparatively short and weak, these 

 slender toes armed with enormous claws, are evidently as well 

 suited for clasping the rugged branch as the enormous hind legs 

 of the kangaroo for bounding over the arid plain. Indeed, in 

 every case, we shall find the fundamental type or idea of the four 

 extremities belonging to the vertebrated animals most admira- 

 bly modified according to their wants : here shortened, there 

 prolonged ; here armed with claws, there terminating in a hoof; 

 here coalescing to a tail, there assuming the shape of a fin ; here 

 clothed with feathers to cleave the air, there raised to the per- 

 fection of the human hand, the wonderful instrument of a still 

 more wonderful intelligence ; and who, seeing all this, can pos- 

 sibly believe that the world is ruled by chance, and not by an 

 all-pervading and almighty power. 



Thus the sloth, so helpless when removed from his native 

 haunts, is far from exhibiting the same torpidity in his move- 

 ments when seen in the place for which Nature fitted him. 



" One day, as we were crossing the Essequibo," says Mr. 

 Waterton, " I saw a large sloth on the ground upon the bank ; 

 how he had got there nobody could tell ; the Indian said he had 

 never surprised a sloth in such a situation before : he would 



